Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Tuesday December 10, 2013 @06:03AM
from the not-you-guys-too dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news that even Canada is getting its hands dirty in the international dragnet fiasco. From the article: "The leaked NSA document being reported exclusively by CBC News reveals Canada is involved with the huge American intelligence agency in clandestine surveillance activities in 'approximately 20 high-priority countries.' ... Wesley Wark, a Canadian security and intelligence expert at the University of Ottawa, says the document makes it clear Canada can take advantage of its relatively benign image internationally to covertly amass a vast amount of information abroad. 'I think we still trade on a degree of an international brand as an innocent partner in the international sphere,' Wark said. 'There's not that much known about Canadian intelligence.'"

While perhaps funny, it misses the point. The story here, and with Germany, and with Britain, and with Italy, etc.. is not about those countries spying. The story is about these countries colluding to oppress their own citizens by said spying. The oppression/suppression of OWS is a verifiable example, and there are numerous stories from the UK and Germany that show how law enforcement used the same type of data to squash dissent.

Intelligence gathering on foreign countries is not a shock, and not a surprise. Nobody sane would argue that we can't monitor what happens in the world. It's what we do with that intelligence that matters, and all of the supposedly "Free" countries have failed in their responsibilities to their own citizens.

Canada as an "innocent partner in the international sphere" was the idea in the late 1940's to early 1950's.
By the early 1950's Canada was finally ready to totally sign over to the US via memoranda of understanding, letters i.e. become totally dependant on the USA.
The main fear of the US was a UK, Australia, NZ, Canada swap that would leak quality US material/methods with no way of tracking any cleared staff outside the US.
Just as Snowden showed a standardisation of junk US telco encryption spreading wor

Not just US ally, Canada is one of the five-eyes group of nations (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). It's pretty well established that these nations security services all work together in unison on just about everything now.

I'd wager given the status of five-eyes that New Zealand similarly uses it's benign image to spy where the US/UK can't get away with it on their behalf.

They really don't care whether you use beef or poultry gravy on your poutine (for the record, poultry is better). At best, most of the domestic surveillance being done by CSE is keyword searches as part of the former Echelon program, but most of us aren't even on their radar -- they just don't have enough people to worry about the minutiae of all of us when there's real work to be done. There've been a few instances where they looked more closely at individuals closely associated with major events, such as

If I had asserted it in public prior to the Snowdon leaks, anonymous apologists would have popped up saying: 'Where is your proof'.Now we have that proof the same anonymous apologists are saying it was: 'Common knowledge'.Hummm.

If I had asserted it in public prior to the Snowdon leaks, anonymous apologists would have popped up saying: 'Where is your proof'.Now we have that proof the same anonymous apologists are saying it was: 'Common knowledge'.Hummm.

Then, I'd say the people you know are pretty much ignorant of the world around them. In Canada, this has been known since the 50's, my great uncle worked in Ottawa as a liaison between the Federal Government and the Canadian Intelligence Services. I got to meet some interesting folks before he died, and at his funeral when he was laid in Beechwood. [wikipedia.org] Which is the Canadian equivalent of Arlington. But I grew up in a small town of ~20k people in the Southern part of Ontario, and people knew this was going on

Blaming one scapegoat will not resolve the deep deep deep corruption in our governing system(s). Short of a complete revolution with heads rolling, it would be futile and would only serve the propagandists.

No the problems start at the top, Senators, Presidents, powerful Congressmen, generals. The problem is the system has no way to deal with them because at those levels it basically depends on the punishing themselves and they have learned to circle the wagons when the people get riled up.

The only option is to target their enablers, folks like clapper. If enough political pressure can be brought to bear and you give them the option to toss someone like Clapper under the bus along with a few low level admin types like snowdens coworkers who broke some rule somewhere some time they will.

Do this often enough and they won't be able to find these facilitators who are willing to go a long with what they know to unethical, immoral, illegal or some combination there of because they will also know that when it comes to light and it will someday, it's going to be them that pays for it.

I am talking about anything like a great purge, my point was we the people can't get something like that done even if we wanted to do it.

Which is why I want to have people down the food chain hang drawn and quartered. My hope is the Clappers of the world come to understand when the public get upset their masters will quickly abandon them to protect their own interests. That way when they get asked to follow orders that are wrong they just might say "No sir, I won't implement a massive domestic spy program

I think this is too simplistic. You can replace every single president, senator and congress-critter in Washington and you'll have the same outcome as you're faced with today. The reason is that members of three letter agencies feel, with all their bleed'n-red-Amerikan-hearts that they are responsible maintaining "continuity". They don't care which political party is in power. They know politicians will come and go.

I think you're very close with your inclusion of generals on your list of those needing t

No the problems start at the top, Senators, Presidents, powerful Congressmen, generals.

No, the real problem is that after ten years of unfettered spying on everyone, the NSA is now at the top of that list, with dirt on everyone from the POTUS on down. THIS is why no real reform will ever occur.

Blaming one scapegoat will not resolve the deep deep deep corruption in our governing system(s). Short of a complete revolution with heads rolling, it would be futile and would only serve the propagandists.

I read the comment not as scapegoating someone but as applying the law to everyone and attaching responsibility and accountability to decisions people make. If nothing else, Clapper lied to Congress. NSA programs have been found illegal. If behavior like that doesn't at least lead to a trial, why won't others follow suit? They certainly benefit from growing their bureaucracies so they have motivation to.

Your point would only be valid if the person had stated to do nothing but haul Clapper away. Putting Clapper in the Pen (not a safe house) would be a starting point. The people doing these things are cowards! It's cowardly to hide their intent, their beliefs, and their actions. You think they would suddenly become heroic when faced with being someone bitch in a real jail? Not a chance of that.

A few of these people in jail would begin a nice series of confessions, and more arrests and people in jail. T

It wasn't what he lied about... it's where he lied. If that had been you or I... we'd probably just be getting out of federal prison now. It's good to be King... but even the king got some flack. Clapper didn't even get scolded.

Due to aforementioned travel, I didn't follow the whole thing very closely, but as I understand it, Clinton answered honestly according to the definitions agreed upon... it's just that those definitions were not really ubiquitous, and certainly not clarified by the scandal-loving media.

Whatever method you use you rely on other people to be relays for your data. They can set up fake relays, they're tapped into the backbones so they can track packets and see how they bounce, they might even be able to insert their own delays to get the packet timing perfect for them, etc.

I do think that darknets (like I2P) start with encryption and build on that. You can choose the number of additional hops used for each application down to 0 and the link stays encrypted.

It seems that its the attack you describe which is very difficult; the attacker would have to masquerade themselves internationally on a huge scale. The NSA doesn't seem able to manage this with Tor, and I2P makes the problem more difficult where everyone is re-routing others' packets by default. So just collecting the meta

It does NOTHING to stop "metadata" collection - your IP packets still have source and destination addresses that have to be encoded in ways anyone can decode it (i.e., if you encrypt that, then every router needs to be able to decrypt it, making it essentially plaintext). Note: Tor solves this problem.

It does nothing about traffic flow fingerprinting - that is, examining how the packets evolve over time to figure out

PS: If you're a terrorist reading this, here's how to communicate securely without any encryption tools needed: Publish your messages in places where a million people can see them, eg. Twitter, a newsgroup, youtube video comments...anything with a lot of readers. Just agree that it will be done on Tuesdays and Thursdays on Youtube's most popular video of the moment at 4:30pm (or something like that). You can upload the message via an Internet cafe if you're really paranoi

I'm NOT defending the NSA, but remember that this type of communication requires... communication. In other words, you have to arrange in advance that the phrase "the chair is purple" means "proceed to site B." The US Government's plan has been to

(a) freeze the assets of the terrorists so that they're constantly strapped for cash(b) via drone strikes and etc., make it clear that when they DO try to meet to arrange things, they'll possibly be blown up(c) look at every single communication between the groups when they DO try to arrange things.

That's their plan, anyway. But anyone with any sense at all should have known that, once all of that surveillance was in place, it would be abused. As it has been.

Counter argument: if the government had *allowed* details of the surveillance to leak, it might deter the terrorists. Kind of like during the Cold War, the US and Soviets *wanted* each side to at least have a rough idea of their capabilities, to further discourage anyone with an itchy finger on the Big Red Button.

But the truth is, intelligence agencies want to know everything. Absolutely everything. It's just like a dog licking his privates: if he can, he will. Likewise, if they can monitor everything you do, they will. They can't resist it.

I'm NOT defending the NSA, but remember that this type of communication requires... communication.

Yes, but once you get the ball rolling it self perpetuates.

Agreed that the real problem is the mentality of the people running the show who just want *everything*. That's why we need to start encrypting now, and later to start increasing the signal to noise ratio.

It's like key negotiation: if your key has leaked, or you have a feeling it might be about to leak, you change it. Requiring another round of communication.

If you meet somebody in the flesh you can exchange any number of keys. Change it once a week, it doesn't matter.

Use the valuable, single-use, keys to exchange more lists of keys. Give one key list to each agent via their list of disposable keys. You only need a single known-secure key exchange to enable thousands of other people to communicate securely.

I imagine you could knock up a piece of software to automate all of that in a couple of weeks. The key lists could be plain text files posted anywhere on the

There is no higher praise.It's like being called a traitor by Dick Cheney ; ).

On the other hand the amount of surprise at these revelations is surprising. Where is peoples sense of history? Remember the second world war (Axis and Allies anyone?) and extrapolate from that incorporating the events since.

There isn't anything in any of these revelations many had not guessed or spotted. There were and still are tons of people who just wanted to live in denial about it. Snodens stuff is making that hard for them as they can't just dismiss the people saying it as tinfoil hat clad conspiracy nuts, with actual evidence floating about.

Cold the reason why Russia and the Soviet Union where/are so interested in 'neutral' Sweden is very simple and not a mystery.
Sweden had deals with the UK to 'swap' elint from ground bases for UK airborne efforts.

Sorry A., but no. The Soviet Union and Russia have long been interested in any country adjacent to their territory that wasn't under Soviet / Russian control. They make the same sort of runs against Finland, Norway, and other countries now, just like they either threatened or invaded their neighbors in the past. Examples: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, etc., etc.

I would think you've been around long enough to realize that not everything is about us. It is often about them, whether them i

Again Cold the reason why the "Soviet Union and Russia have long been interested in any country adjacent to their territory" is due to the real risk of repeated invasion.
Russia lives in a very bad neighbourhood, historically surrounded by kings with faith based dreams, slavers,~ "colonialists" after Russian raw materials, fast moving fascists and a big spend military-industrial complex.
Lets go down a simple short list:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus [wikipedia.org]'
Sweden with Teutonic Knights 124

Well, to be fair the Cons won the majority with just 39% of the vote so 61% of Canadians didn't vote for them. The problem is most of the seats are in Ontario (NDP/Con 95), BC (Con/NDP 28), Alberta (Con 21), Saskatchewan(Con 14) make up 158 of 282 seats, which is 56% of the seats for four out of 13 provinces and territories. Alberta, the Texas of Canada, and Saskatchewan are almost competently conservative. Ontario and BC are at least half Con. So conservatively speaking (pun intended) there's about 96 seat

I don't think anything I said eluded to what I believe the Liberals, Conservatives or NDP would do if they were the ones in power. All I said, other than providing a bunch of factual numbers, was I don't like Harper's Bush Jr., ignorance is bliss, leadership style. Which is basically to lock the media out, fire or gag anyone that can provide evidence his policies aren't based on facts and and flood every channel with attack and economic action plan ads.

Actually it was the Liberals who put in the regulations that saved us during the recession and housing market crash. Given a little more time the Conservatives would have removed all those evil regulations.As nice as the tax cuts were, the fact is that we are in more debt per capita then the Americans and cutting taxes instead of paying off the debt and actually increasing the debt seems as stupid as a household cutting back on going to work because they finally started paying down the credit cards and had

Fair enough, I was just trying to point out they'd stand a better chance of getting my vote if they focused on what they were actually doing/did rather than focusing on what their opposite is doing wrong. Especially when what they're focusing on seems to be extremely superficial non-political issues. Every time I hear a conservative poke fun at Trudeau's hair or how good he's only going to win because of his charming smile attracting the female vote it just makes me want to punch them in the mouth and vote

The attack ad mentality is horrible for democracy with the Conservatives position being basically that those other guys have problems and trust us, we're Conservatives. And as you point out, most of the attacks are BS or worse anyways. The marijuana attack ads where they pretend that making pot harder for kids to get is a bad thing, the personal attacks on Trudeau, the lies about the NDPs plans for a carbon tax etc. If they actually campaigned on their real agenda they would never have got a majority and th

When something gets modded down as "Overrated", it doesn't change the mod classification. You can get modded all the way down to -1 with a positive mod class that way. It also works the other way with "Underrated", leading to such things as "Score: 5, Troll".

By the time anyone is willing to take the reports of some fisherman in slicks and a dingy sinking battle ships seriously we'll own three quarters of the world. The only country that *could* do anything about it is the US and we'll just stop printing Canada on world maps and globes, the Americans will never find us. The plan is working perfectly, eh.

Boston cream donuts actually contain mind control drugs, and the coffee is primarily nicotine and chocolate to get people addicted and keep them coming back for the donuts. I know, I use to work there baking and filling muffins with hallucinogenics.

I still remember when I first moved from Nova Scotia to North Carolina and having an argument with the geography teacher over where Nova Scotia was located. After about five minutes of arguing we went to the map and I was kicked out of class for the rest of the year for "show boating" as he put it. Then even when I was living in Bar Harbor, Main I still met people that didn't know where *Canada* was. It's like come on, Main is right on the border with New Brunswick and there's a ferry that runs from Bar Har

I still remember when I first moved from Nova Scotia to North Carolina and having an argument with the geography teacher over where Nova Scotia was located. After about five minutes of arguing we went to the map and I was kicked out of class for the rest of the year for "show boating" as he put it. Then even when I was living in Bar Harbor, Main I still met people that didn't know where *Canada* was. It's like come on, Main is right on the border with New Brunswick and there's a ferry that runs from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, How could you not know where Canada was?

Your geography teacher didn't know where Nova Scotia is? SMH. And then he/she kicks you out of class for making him/her look bad for not knowing his/her own damn material. BTW, it's spelled "Maine".;-)

And yes that actually happened. I was given a "pass" on geography because the teacher didn't want me back in his class, and frankly I didn't want to be there. I don't know what my Mom was screaming at the principal, but I'm guessing because I was only at that school for six months anyway the principal didn't think it would be worth the PR nightmare to fail me.

It's actually kind of weird because that's what I expected, but most of the people I met in NC were actually really nice and didn't come off as the super major bible thumpers I was expecting them to be. It's a shame their very visible representatives or overly vocal religious extremist make them out to look so foolish.